Oscar Grant

I wouldn’t normally jump on a bandwagon, but I tend to trust Melissa McEwan’s viewpoint, and what I’ve read and watched today about the murder of Oscar Grant is sick.

Californian police shot Oscar Grant, a black man, who was sitting peacefully and doing as he was asked.

Remember the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting? Remember how that was another man racially stereotyped into death? Remember how any oppression of any minority group affects every other minority group? Remember how racial stereotyping means that police can “mistake” a 12 year-old black girlfor a prostitute – because that’s what they think a prostitute should look like, a black child.

This is so wrong. So very, very wrong.

And because it is wrong, please, everybody who reads this, make a fuss. If you’re American, do these things. If you’re not, post it up on your own blog so that people hear about it.

I’m not black, and I’m not Brazillian, and I’m not American, and I’m certainly not a man. But this kind of thing affects everybody. It even affects the white, middle-class, moneyed, able-bodied, heterosexual, cissexual men I know, the ones so full of privillege they ooze it from every pore. Why? Because just as I don’t exist in a vacuum, nor do they. And, logically, every single one of those men knows me. And I’m not “one of them”. Which makes me a combination of “others”. Which makes me directly affected by anything like these stories, and makes them indirectly affected, through me. Very few men like this will exist in a world that purely consists of other men just like them. I would suggest that no man does. And so, at the risk of labouring the point, this kind of thing affects everybody. And it’s horrific.